A story from Miami is just another example of how a dishonest law enforcement officer can cover for the inaccuracies of the breath test machine causing breath test results to be questionable in thousands of cases. I hesitate to post these kinds of stories, although frankly there is at least one every month or two. I do not want to appear to be anti-law enforcement. The majority of police officers are dedicated, hard-working people doing a tough job and doing it with integrity. However, given that my last post concerned cheating on the breath test, I thought I would highlight this story to demonstrate that these sorts of issues are not as rare as they should be.
In Miami, FL, the person in charge of the Intoxilyzer 8000 (the same machine used in Kansas DUI cases) for the Miami-Dade Police Department was required to run certain tests on the machine on a regular basis to check and demonstrate that the machine was operating properly. Just about every state has such a quality control program. The Intoxilyzer 8000 has a modem on it and every test run on the machine in Florida is downloaded to a central repository where its results can be monitored for accuracy and compliance with the quality control program.
The officer in the story was running the quality control tests on the machine, but whenever the machine would start to malfunction, she would just unplug the machine so that the test was aborted, erased and never reported via the download as required. Thus the state authorities could never see that the machine was malfunctioning and the police department could keep on giving breath tests to hapless, unknowing drivers. No doubt, over the 18 month period that this was happening, thousands of people were convicted of a serious crime, put in jail and had their licenses revoked, all based on a machine that was not working properly and was not in compliance with the quality control program for the state. The officer was fired but it remains to be seen what will happen with all of those cases.
As I have said before, I have seen this sort of thing in Kansas DUI cases, as well. It can happen anywhere. Again, most officers are honest and play by the rules, but it only takes one to start fudging breathalyzer results and call into question thousands of breath tests. This is one of the reasons that hiring the best Kansas DUI attorney you can find is so important. A DUI defense attorney needs to be aggressive in hunting down the documents concerning the machine that your breath was tested on, getting all of the maintenance logs, testing logs and calibration logs, and any and all repair records.
I recently discovered that when the Kansas Department of Health and Environment changed the regulations for breath testing in Kansas on March 14, 2008, they failed to re-certify their Intoxilyzer machines. They failed to require that any of the police departments follow the new rules that they issued! When I raised it in a trial, their response was to just print up new certificates with the new regulation numbers and mail them out to each agency, despite the fact that no one had followed the regulations. I raised it in a trial on September 11, 2008. On September 12, 2008 the KDHE issued the new certificates and BACKDATED them to March 14, 2008, in an effort to conceal this massive problem. What? Anyway, there will likely be more on this issue later. Suffice it to say, these breath tests are supposed to be scientific and accurate. Someone has to apply strict scrutiny to these breath testing programs to watch out for this type of fudging.